124 'She has spoken to me . . . deceased child.' From Louisa Hatherill's testimony at the Wiltshire magistrates' court, 27 July 1860.
125 While Constance was in gaol . . . taken into custody. This rumour was reported in the Bristol Daily Post of 24 July 1860.
126 Whicher was careful . . . other policemen. Fifteen years earlier, in March 1845, Mayne had reprimanded Whicher and his fellow Detective-Sergeant Henry Smith for showing a want of respect to senior officers that was 'most indiscreet and legally unjustifiable'. As it was the first time that any detectives 'had improperly come into collision' with their uniformed colleagues, Mayne let the pair off with a caution, but he warned that any future offence would be dealt with severely. From MEPO 7/7, police orders and notices from the office of the Commissioner, cited in The Rise of Scotland Yard: A History of the Metropolitan Police (1956) by Douglas G. Browne.
129 As for her supposed lover . . . or the Neighbourhood'. In a note by Whicher on a letter from Sir John Eardley Wilmot on 16 August 1860, in MEPO 3/61.
129 the fullest version . . . fishing in the river. Reported in the Somerset and Wilts Journal, 13 October 1860.
129 In the county court the previous month . . . rival dairy farmer. From the Frome Times, 20 June 1860.
CHAPTER 10
134 A man in North Leverton . . . She fainted. Account of the Sarah Drake case from reports in The Times, 8 December 1849 to 10 January 1850.
136 In the spring of 1860 . . .the name of her employer. Reported in the News of the World, 3 June 1860.
137 Alienists detailed . . . cold cunning. Monomania was a condition identified by the French physician Jean-Etienne Dominique Esquirol in 1808. See Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts 1830–1890 (1998), edited by Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth.
137 The Times . . . the key to the asylum?' On 22 July 1853.
137 It was even suggested . . . puerperal mania. Stapleton reported this rumour in his book of 1861.
137 Perhaps the killer had a double consciousness. For double consciousness and crime, see Unconscious Crime: Mental Absence and Criminal Responsibility in Victorian London (2003) by Joel Peter Eigen.
138 'Experience has shown . . . seemingly irrelevant.' In 'The Mystery of Marie Roget' (1842) by Edgar Allan Poe.
138 'I made a private inquiry . . . as a trifle yet.' Arthur Conan Doyle's private detective Sherlock Holmes adopted the same techniques: 'You know my method. It is based on the observation of trifles'; 'there is nothing so important as trifles' – from 'The Man with the Twisted Lip' (1891).
138 He asked Sarah Cox . . . within the hour. From Whicher's reports in MEPO 3/61 and Cox's testimony at the Wiltshire magistrates' court on 27 July 1860.
139 'When I am deeply perplexed . . . work out my problems. 'From Diary of an Ex-Detective (1859), 'edited' by Charles Martel (in fact written by the New Bond Street bookseller Thomas Delf). In a similar passage in Waters' Experiences of a Real Detective (1862) the narrator mulls over a case as if assembling a jigsaw or a collage: 'I lay down on a sofa and had a good think; put together, now this way, now that way, the different items, scraps, and hints, furnished me, in order to ascertain how they held together, and what, as a whole, they seemed to be like.'
141 As Mr Bucket says . . . point of view.' A detective's greatest weapon, said Dickens, was his ingenuity. 'For ever on the watch, with their wits stretched to the utmost, these officers have . . . to set themselves against every novelty of trickery and dexterity that the combined imaginations of all the lawless rascals in England can devise, and to keep pace with every such invention that comes out.' From the second part of 'A Detective Police Party', House-hold Words, 10 August 1850.
In The Perfect Murder (1989) David Lehman observed that 'the detective novel took murder out of the ethical realm and put it into the realm of aesthetics. Murder in a murder mystery becomes a kind of poetic conceit, often quite a baroque one; the criminal is an artist, the detective an aesthete and critic, and the blundering policeman a philistine.' See also The Aesthetics of Murder: A Study in Romantic Literature and Contemporary Culture (1991) by Joel Black.
142 The nightdress was his missing link . . . evolved from apes. A nightdress that tied a respectable adolescent girl to murder, like the bones that would prove the connection between men and monkeys, was a terrible object, to be feared as much as sought. For the anxieties aroused by the idea of the missing link, see Forging the Missing Link: Interdisciplinary Stories (1992) by Gillian Beer. For negative evidence and the nineteenth-century endeavour to decipher fragments, see Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence: The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens and Doyle (2003) by Lawrence Frank, and the same author's 'Reading the Gravel Page: Lyell, Darwin, and Conan Doyle' in Nineteenth-Century Literature, December 1989.
142 Dickens compared the detectives . . . new form of crime. From the second part of 'A Detective Police Party', House-hold Words, 10 August 1850. In the mid-nineteenth century the idea of detection imprinted itself on natural history, astronomy, journalism – any pursuit that could be construed as a quest for truth.
145 In Governess Life . . . destroying the peace of families'. For the sexual and social uncertainty provoked by the figure of the governess, see The Victorian Governess (1993) by Kathryn Hughes.
146 Forbes Benignus Winslow . . . their children'. In On Obscure Diseases of the Brain, and Disorders of the Mind (1860). An extract appears in Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts 1830–1890 (1998), edited by Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth.
146 The detective was another . . . sully a middle-class home. For the threats to middle-class privacy posed by servants and policemen, see Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel (1989) by Anthea Trodd.
CHAPTER 11
157 During Whicher's inquiries . . . dreadful crime.' From the Frome Times, 18 July 1860.
158 The word 'detect' . . . fascination with the case. See Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel (1989) by Anthea Trodd. In Alain-René Le Sage's Le Diable Boiteux (1707), still popular in Victorian England, Asmodeus perched on the steeple of a Spanish church and stretched out his hand to lift every roof in the city, revealing the secrets within. The Times in 1828 referred to the French detective Vidocq as 'an Asmodeus'. In Dombey and Son (1848), Dickens called for 'a good spirit who would take the house-tops off, with a more potent and benignant hand than the lame demon in the tale, and show a Christian people what dark shapes issue from amidst their homes'. In House-hold Words articles of 1850 Dickens referred to how the demon could 'untile and read' men's brains, as if bodies were buildings, and himself took 'Asmodeus-like peeps' into 'the internal life' of houses from the carriage of a train. Janin's reference to Asmodeus was in Paris; Or the Book of One Hundred and One (translated 1832).